Wednesday, 16 May 2018

Nations and Nationalism: Myth and Reality

“Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.” Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? (1882)

Nationalism as a political phenomenon is real, powerful, and often
destructive. But historical myths lie at its core. To nationalists, historical
facts are peripheral, to be used, distorted, or ignored as required. For them, nationalism is a religion of sorts, built largely on faith.

Nationalism claims to express spontaneous and primordial feelings of
national community. In fact, it is a modern ideology that requires persistent
propaganda to maintain itself.

The roots of nationalism lie in the concept of a nation. Dictionaries
define a nation as “a people who share common customs, origins, history, and often
language.” (American Heritage Dictionary)

British historian Eric Hobsbawm mocked this standard view: “A nation is
a group of people with a misapprehension about their common origins and a
common antipathy towards their neighbours.” (Nationalism, 1990)

Nationalism as a conscious ideology began to emerge in the 18th
century. One of the early theorists, Johann Gottfried Herder, defined a
nation culturally: “a group defined by a homogeneous national culture” by which
he meant, language, customs, traditions. (Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, 1784-91)

Popularized, Herder’s ideas were especially important – and explosive -- in Central
and Eastern Europe, where divided "nations" and multi-ethnic states held sway. Dozens of “nationalities”
were mixed together in the Hapsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Empires. When they
began to gain a consciousness of their "national identity" in the 19th century, they began to dream
of creating their own “nation-states.”

Many early nationalists viewed such a development as part of God’s design,
which kings and aristocrats had defiled. This is how Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini explained it:

“God divided Humanity into distinct groups upon the face
of our globe, and this planted the seeds of nations. Bad governments have disfigured
the design of God, which you may see clearly marked out, as far as, at least as
regards Europe, by the course of the great rivers, by the lines of the lofty
mountains, and by other geographical conditions; they have disfigured it by
conquest, by greed, by jealousy of the just sovereignty of others…. But the divine
design will infallibly be fulfilled.” (The
Duties of Man, 1860)

For Mazzini and most nationalists, nations (and hence nation-states) are
a natural development. Modern students of nationalism tend to take a different view:
that nations are “created”, not by God, but by men, for political reasons. As Benedict
Anderson put it in 1983, “A nation is an imagined political community.” (Imagined Communities)

In the same year, Ernest Gellner gave this definition of nation: “Nations
as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent … political destiny,
are a myth: nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns
them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing
cultures: that is a reality.” (Nations and Nationalism, 1983)

In his 1992 history of nations and nationalism, Hobsbawm came up with a useful
if working definition of a nation: “any sufficiently large body of people whose
members regard themselves as a ‘nation’ will be treated as such.” (Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Myth and
Reality)

In other words, ‘nations’ (and nation-states) are a matter of
perception; they are essentially constructed. An Italian nationalist put it
bluntly in 1860, when the new United Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed: “We have
made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” (Speech to the first meeting of the parliament
of Italy, 1860)

The same process was going on in the German states, most of which united
together in to the German Empire in 1871 under the leadership of Prussia and its Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. For the conservative Bismarck, a united Germany was a political necessity, and the process had to be guided from above, through a policy of "blood and iron." (read: "war" -- three wars to be exact)

In much of Central and Eastern Europe
creating nation-states would prove even messier, as the ethnic maps below, from just before the First World War, show. The first is the Austro-Hungarian or Hapsburg Empire, the second the "Hungarian" portion of the same empire.

Sorting this melange out into viable nation-states would prove a herculean task, and one providing many an excuse for war, helping to make the 20th century the bloodiest in human history. Nationalism also spread beyond Europe. The story is not yet finished.

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About Me

Following more than thirty years as a history professor, I am now doing freelance writing, editing, speaking, and consulting. I received my PhD. from
the University of Wisconsin-Madison and taught history at the College of
Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina from 1974 until 2008.

My most recent non-fiction work,
Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge and New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) has received excellent reviews and was a co-winner of the SHEAR
Prize (2012) for best book on the history of the early American republic.

I have reviewed manuscripts for journals and academic publishers and
have consulted or done research on various historical projects for individuals,educational television,and organizations, including most recently, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Atlantic Studies, South Carolina Educational Television, and University of South Carolina Press.

I have recently completed a novel of the American Revolution entitled Garden of Liberty and am working on a second novel, about a London physician and the body snatching trade in the 1790's, tentatively entitled Wells of Death.

SKILLS: Writing, Editing, Researching, Consulting, Teaching, Public Speaking. AWARDS, PRIZES, HONORS: SHEAR Best Book Prize, Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, 2012, co-winner.Distinguished Professor, College of Charleston, 2002Governor’s Distinguished Professor, College of Charleston, 1998South Carolina Historical Association, Prize for Best Paper published in Proceedings of the South Carolina Historical Association, 1993-94Distinguished Teaching Award, College of Charleston, 1985

MAJOR PUBLICATIONS: Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Associate Editor, South Carolina Encyclopedia. Responsible for hundreds of entries on medicine and science, many of which I wrote myself. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.

Moonlight, Magnolias, and Madness: Insanity in South Carolina from the Colonial to the Progressive Eras. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.